Cindy Bethel

Cindy L. Bethel, Ph.D. (IEEE and ACM Senior Member) is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department and holds the Billie J. Ball Endowed Professorship in Engineering at Mississippi State University (MSU). She started with NSF as an IPA Program Director for the CISE/IIS/HCC cluster in October 2022. In 2019, Cindy was a U.S. Fulbright Senior Scholar to Australia sponsored by the University of Technology Sydney. She is the Director of the Social, Therapeutic, and Robotic Systems (STaRS) lab. Dr. Bethel has managed over $13 million dollars in grant funding since starting at Mississippi State University in August 2011. She has published over 100 peer reviewed journal articles, conference papers, and workshop papers in prestigious venues. From 2020-2022 She served as a member of the Board of Directors for the Computing Research Association and from 2021-2022 she was a member of the CRA Government Affairs Committee. She also served as a founding Co-Chair of the Socially Responsible Computing Working Group for the CRA in 2022.  She has been active in her professional research community serving on the Steering Committee for the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and the ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (2015-2019). She was an NSF/CRA/CCC Computing Innovation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Social Robotics Laboratory at Yale University. From 2005 - 2008, she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and was the recipient of the 2008 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Graduate Fellowship. She graduated in August 2009 with her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of South Florida with doctoral minors in Psychology and in Applied Statistics. Her research interests include human-robot interaction, human-computer interaction, robotics, artificial intelligence, social engineering, and cognitive psychology. Her research focuses on applications associated with robotic therapeutic support, information gathering from children, and the use of robots for law enforcement, search and rescue, and military applications.